Simplicity and Purity of Wash Painting
Simplicity
As a painter, Fuyin uses brush as his only tool, which is rare today. As opposed to many painters and
writer, who turns to computer for the sake of convenience and fashion, Fuyin sticks to the brush,
which is as traditional and hard to change as the use of chopsticks. The Chinese paintings by Fuyin
display magically the effect of oil painting in texture. Fuyin, like his precursors, insists on lines, the old
painting custom. Fuyin’s purity is embodies in two places. One is his attitude towards work: he hides
himself in Guangzhou, cuts off all unnecessary personal and market connections, and fully focuses
on reading and painting. The other one is the quality of his works: pure, simple, and rare.
Wash painting
As a wash painter, Fuyin lives up to the name. He paints first with water, then colors, and then ink.
Recently, particularly, he paints with seas.
The way he paints is unprecedented. He has been long working on this unique style and narrating
aesthetics. Unlike those, who fetch water out of a deep well, he works on the surface of water.
The water resources for his living come from the Xiang River and the Pearl River. Living long on
these two waters, he senses sharply their variations. The water resources for his painting come from
the Chinese wash paintings: Xu Wei’s musaceae, Zhu Da’s fish, Shi Lu’s banyan, are all unique wash
painting masterpieces in the world painting history with water as the medium. Fuyin’s application of
water offers a whole new visual effect.
Flat Surface
Fuyin is expert at surface furnishing. All is good if the surface looks good, and vice versa. The
“surface” here refers to the surface of rice paper.
21st century is said to be a flat century: history is no longer linear and the earth is no longer round.
In the completely flat times, everything is flattened. The art of painting is involved with such surfaces
as the wall, cloth and paper. Fuyin, however, paints on the surface of water with his unique method
and original language.
First, he puts a large piece of rice paper on a giant painting table. Then, he wets the paper with light
ink or light color. The wet rice paper sticks evenly to the table surface. Now Fuyin begins to work on
the wet paper. He draws the outlines with the brush and lays the ink on the surface of water. The
customary ink application methods and the wash painting effect no longer appear. The traditional
way of adding details and the effects of dryness and wetness are hard to maintain. Even the least
variation of the out-of-control ink in the water causes the rapid color change on the whole piece of
paper.
God, the freest among all, is believed to be capable of walking on water, which can hardly approach-
ed by ordinary people. Fuyin stresses the planar construction of paintings, which differs from the
construction in the western art in that Fuyin’ s is more casual because he keeps looking for freedom
within the limits of planes.
Anti-line
Fuyin’s application of lines differs greatly from tradition both in quantity and in quality. He uses lines
to construct paintings and to lay forms, without the traditional imitational and narrative functions.
What he cares is the relationship between lines and paintings and the rhythmic expressions of lines.
He works between the physical state and the metaphysical state, which transforms the superficial
depiction into the essential formal language exploration. This utter self awareness is rare in modern
Chinese painting, in which Chinese painting is used as the medium and figure painting as the vehicle.
Fuyin’s applications of lines, anti-lines, as he calls them, are more than lines. They are no longer the
attachment of forms or content: they are the meeting point of emotion, personality and traits. He
inherits the simplest essence of lines after their thousands of years of changes, which is an unusual
expression of modern meaning.
Fuyin used to be a serial picture painter and was good at various deformed painting skills. It is not
hard to imagine the practice and comprehension demanded in the switch from narrating painting to
formal painting. Fuyin paints one thousand paintings a year, and in this process he keeps simplifying
intentionally. Fuyin’s body paintings bear some resemblance to those modernist painters like Matisse,
Modigliani, etc., and Lin Fengmian and Changyu in China. Some are even similar to Keith Haring’s
doodling, but these two are distinctive from each other at a second look. What he overtakes is the
Dunhuang wall paintings full of spirit. What he has thoroughly mastered is the folk style full of
simplicity and innocence of childhood.
Ba Da
Learning for many years from Zhu Da, who was nicknamed Ba Da, Fuyin has reached the acme of
perfection in combining Ba Da’s style with his own. Does he unite two into one, or split one into two?
Does he learn from Ba Da, or is Ba Da just a measurement? Those fishes swim from under his brush
with water. Fuyin and Ba Da painted the same thing in different ways. Ba Da’s fish is slower and dryer.
Some even show the whites of their eyes. Fuyin’s fish is quicker and smoother with calm expressions,
and swims through the water into the painting. To fish in the water by hand is usually fruitless, but
Fuyin has caught the fish by grasping the essence of simplistic painting.
Unprecedented and undescended, Ba Da’s art peaked in Chinese painting history. Some foreigners
came to study painting in China out of their interest in Ba Da and ended up still in the sole interest in
Ba Da. Chinese painters frequently study Ba Da. Some even have their imitative works published.
But even though the skills and methods look similar, the spirit and the soul are completely different.
Fuyin has gone deeper. To inherit the theme of ancestors is a tradition of Chinese painting, but the
painting skills and the spirit, the way I see it, are more and more true to himself.
He once compared his own conditions with Qi Baishi’s and came to the conclusion that he enjoyed
better living conditions than Qi. Qi’s giving up learning from Ba Da and turning to Wu Changshuo
was thought by Fuyin to give up the best. He also made a comparison between Ba Da and Shi Tao,
which caused him to firmly believe that the former’s paintings were far better than the latter’s, and Ba
Da was like the shiny moon in the night, surrounded by all the stars. He cannot be clearer of Qi’s
axiom that “Those who learn survive; those who imitate die”. At the beginning of the learning, he
consciously immersed himself in Ba Da’s works. After the learning, unaware, he kept a distance
Desolation
Fuyin often says Hunan is a desolate place. He must get this thought from Qu Yuan, the famous
Chinese patriot and poet. He once described the scene of the early winter about the dry willow
standing at the bank, a single boat with a broken rope, and no fisherman on the boat. Desolation
means solemnity as well as sadness. Hunanese are known for their unusual personalities: determin-
ed and independent. “I cannot change myself to meet the mainstream, so I will keep sad and poor all
my life.” (Qu Yuan) Indifference to both fame and materials and fearlessness are represented in
Fuyin’s art.
Fuyin also commented that Goethe kept fleeing all his life. Fleeing back to oneself means the utter
safety. We know, not only Goethe, many modern German writers and artists had the tendency to flee.
Kafka was exiled spiritually all his life. Brecht took exiles as aesthetics. Desolation, exiles or lonelin-
ess, are basis to achieve great artists. Thus, we learn the reasons behind Fuyin's earnest love for Su
Shi, Ba Da, Xu Wei and Shi Lu, and roughly understand how he felt when he moved all the way from
Hunan to Guangzhou.
In Between
Fuyin wrote a book Sturdy Rice Seedlings Full of Grains. Fuyin once had a studio called Half New
Half Old Studio. He said that artists wander all their lives between the new and the old. They are both
nostalgic and looking forward to future. From his life and art experiences, a lot of “betweens” can be
found: his education experiences were between college and primary school; he moved between
Changsha and Guangzhou; his missing thoughts go back and forth between his hometown and his
family; his hobbies are found between painting and writing; he found the breakthrough between
tradition and modernity; his life style is between daintiness and casualness; he pursues between
realities and ideals; his writing style finds its place between idleness and mildness; he expresses
between the abstract way and the concrete way; he thinks between subjectively and objectively;
he finds joys between work and life; he improves between simplicity and purity…
Fuyin
Fuyin is a self perfectionist, who keeps improving himself within the system of his native language
and formal language. His ultimate goal is to achieve the state of emptiness. Such a system suffered
greatly from the number reduction of its members, with only a few exceptions like Qi Baishi and
Huang Binghong. This system used to be filled with great names like Fan Kuan, Xu Wei, Ba Da, etc.,
who blended their reclusive style, writers’ emotions, civilians’ awareness and scholarliness. These
masters reached perfection in skills and techniques. Because of them, the world enjoys the variety
of cultures. Other painters mostly adopt the western way or make a compromise by combining the
western with the eastern. Their paintings are rich in techniques but are not as characteristic. As an
inheritor of Chinese painting in the 21st century, Fuyin’s paintings set their basis in China, absorb
extensively other styles, seek changes intentionally, give priority to form and stress purity and
simplicity.?
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2008 Studio One
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